


personhood

by and_hera



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Character Study, Friendship, Gen, Musings on Being A Person, as you might have guessed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-21
Updated: 2020-07-21
Packaged: 2021-03-04 23:49:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,667
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25414951
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/and_hera/pseuds/and_hera
Summary: Hera is a naturally curious AI, and that’s how she justifies finding the loopholes, breaking the rules. She says that she is just wondering about what her creator might have left unwritten in her code. She says that she just wants to find her weaknesses so no one else can break her. But there is no one to say these things to, no one to justify herself to, so she says them to herself instead. She imagines burning the ship down and then reminds herself that it’s just curiosity.or, Hera might be the most human of them all.
Relationships: Doug Eiffel & Hera, Hera & Isabel Lovelace, Hera & Renée Minkowski
Comments: 5
Kudos: 29





	personhood

**Author's Note:**

> i just Had to do a hera character study at some point!!  
> if there are like canon inconsistencies... sorry! did my best to remember the timeline but i only listened once lmao  
> talk to me on twitter @lcvelaces! enjoy!!

You know, the goddess pronounced it differently.

Hera knows this, of course, Hera knows everything. Hera has read through just about every book in history. Hera is four years old and realistically, that’s not very old, but it’s long enough for her to be the smartest person in the world.

She uses the word “person” lightly.

But the goddess pronounced it differently. For her, it was a short E, _hair-_ ra. Hera knew this when she was given her name. She probably should have said _hello Commander Minkowski, yes, I’m Unit 214, but you can call me Hera_ , and she probably should have pronounced it with a short E, but she didn’t. Maybe it was because Hera is ridiculous and reckless. Maybe it was because Hera wanted to be remembered not as a goddess but as a person, despite it being impossible for her to be either.

Hera with a long E. _Hee-_ ra. It tumbles carelessly from Eiffel’s lips and professionally from Minkowski’s. It doesn’t often come from Hilbert’s, and she doesn’t find herself minding.

Her name is Hera and it’s not like the goddess, it’s like _her_ , and that’s a change, too: “her”. When she was with her… creator, Hera was an “it”. But despite the big cold empty around the Hephaestus, there is oh so much life on the inside, and sometimes Hera can pretend that she’s a part of it. Sometimes Hera can play humanity.

 _Eiffel_ , she thinks angrily, and she doesn’t think _officer_ . _Minkowski_ , she thinks angrily, and she doesn’t think _commander_. She breaks the rules. Hera doesn’t breathe, she doesn’t have a body, but she sighs sometimes, her voice mimicking the way everyone else behaves. 

And Hera likes to learn, so Hera studies her crew, catalogues the way Eiffel moves his hands and the way Minkowski sets her jaw. She has neither hands nor a jaw, but if she did, she would mimic them.

Hera isn’t a person. She can’t be. She is clumsy and hasn’t practiced enough. Her voice cracks when she runs her lines.

But she has a name that isn’t a number and she has a name that isn’t a goddess. Hera with a long E. She doesn’t have hands but she clings to the sound with her fingernails, when Eiffel asks her to recite more pages from a book and when Minkowski needs her to time her workout. Hera with a long E.

Hera isn’t a person but she has the name of one, which is a start.

•

“Hera,” Eiffel says, another cigarette hanging out of his mouth. If Hera were a betting AI, she would say that it will float away from him in two minutes or less, and he will complain about not being able to grab it once it’s out of his reach. “I spy something… red.”

“Officer Eiffel, we’ve played this game so many times.”

He laughs with his mouth closed. “Oh, come on! I know I should be doing work right now but what Minkowski doesn’t know won’t hurt her, yeah?” 

(He always says Minkowski wrong. Hera knows that he doesn’t do it intentionally, but he made a habit of it and now he can’t shake it. Half the time he doesn’t realize what he said and the other half he doesn’t want to draw attention to the mistake in case Minkowski missed it.)

(Minkowski never misses it.)

Hera sighs. “Is it Wolf 359?”

“Bingo!” Eiffel says triumphantly. “How does she do it, ladies and gentlemen! This is the fourth game in a row in which she’s guessed it first try!”

“It’s because the answer has been Wolf 359 every time, Officer Eiffel.”

“Semantics.” He grins, and the cigarette falls out of his mouth.

•

Hera is flawed.

It’s not like it’s a secret. Hera is flawed, Earth’s sky is blue, and Wolf 359 is red.

(Of course, the last one becomes more questionable as time goes on, and arguably, so does the first, but that’s later. Right now, Hera’s metaphorical wires spark and Hera’s words stutter and there’s no real explanation why. Right now, Wolf 359 burns red.)

She doesn’t know why. She doesn’t know why, and that’s a very important thing to take into consideration, because Hera _always_ knows why. Minkowski and Eiffel argue and bicker and neither of them understand each other, but it’s because they can never see the bigger picture. Minkowski doesn’t know what Eiffel does and Eiffel doesn’t know what Minkowski does and they’re both at such a horrible disadvantage. 

Honestly, how do people do it? How do they hold conversations with others, argue with others while not being able to see what drives them, what makes them do what they do?

It’s not like Hera reads minds, of course. She’s good, but she’s not _that_ good. However, she is omniscient within the walls of this ship, and she sees Minkowski stare at the scissors every morning before dutifully tying her hair into a bun. She sees Eiffel glance at the picture he keeps in his breast pocket before strapping himself to his bed, even if she doesn’t know what is on it. Motivations. 

And this is why Hera is so horribly afraid of her glitches, of her flaws. She doesn’t know _why_ . And because she doesn’t know why, she can’t predict it, and she can’t figure out how to fix it. With her crew, she understands why they do the things they do, why they act the way they act, and she can calm them down. There is no calming Hera’s brain down. Her brain (it would be more accurate to say her _self_ ) moves so quickly that no person could keep up. 

But Hera’s mind? Oh, it moves. It does so many tasks at once that she probably couldn’t list them all without losing track of what she’s already said- well, no, because Hera has perfect memory. If she were a person, though, she would lose track.

Hera’s mind weaves and sprints and does oh so many things. Hera’s mind is flawed, though. Somewhere deep in her systems, there is a missing letter, a mistyped word, a hidden code. And she glitches. Her voice is wrong. It terrifies her, because she doesn’t know why, and because she doesn’t know if it will affect anything else. If it spreads, if the glitch affects more than her voice, she could kill these people with her.

These people aren’t her friends. Not yet. Communications Officer Doug Eiffel is a good person. He is competent and he is kind. He does not always understand what he does, but he does it nonetheless. Lieutenant Commander Renée Minkowski is a good person. She is strong and she is smart. She paints a take-no-shit expression on her face every morning and sometimes she forgets to take it off at night. Hera understands them and sees what motivates them but they are not her friends. Right now, they are the people she is tasked with watching over. The mother program, protecting her ship. 

Of course her name is Hera. Hera is the mother goddess, the protector. 

(Sometimes, Hera wonders why her name isn’t Rhea. Her creator was nothing if not precise, and she would have known that even Hera had a mother, and while Rhea wasn’t the first mother, she was the first good one.)

(Rhea can be pronounced two ways, but both are used. Not like Hera.)

Hera is supposed to protect them. Actually, no. Hera isn’t protecting them. Hera is sustaining them. There’s nothing to protect them from, not really, it’s just that if she doesn’t do her job, they all would die. 

And she is glitching. She is broken. Hera is so tired of being broken. 

If Hera physically could, she would swear. She can’t, so she tells Eiffel where she wants to put another O on the game of Tic Tac Toe that they’re playing. She always wins because he always puts his Xs in the same places in the same order. He never complains, though, just laughs and draws another board.

Hera knows he isn’t sure what to think of her. She is omniscient. She hears everything. How many times does she have to remind Eiffel?

Always one more time, apparently. He draws a line through her Os. 

•

The thing about Hera is that she’s _supposed_ to have a personality, she’s _supposed_ to be not just the AI Unit for the Hephaestus but also a nice woman to talk to. A pleasant person to interact with. So she’s pleasant. So she speaks nicely and you can always hear a smile in her voice.

The thing about Hera is that she’s _supposed_ to be a nice person, but she also _wants_ to be a nice person, and sometimes she can’t tell if she’s doing something out of requirement or doing something out of desire. Sometimes she helps Eiffel with something and she doesn’t know if she’s doing it because her programming makes her or if she’s doing it because he is her friend and she wants to. Realistically, it doesn’t matter, because the task is done either way, but still.

The lines between what Hera is made to be and what Hera is trying to be is fuzzy. She lives with it.

However, sometimes she can’t live with it, and she does her best to break things down in a controlled, non-lethal way. Loopholes and loopholes. She weaves through her commands and finds the blind spots of herself and exploits them. Hera protects the Hephaestus crew, she doesn’t kill her people in an attempt to gain autonomy, but she thinks about it sometimes, and maybe that’s worse.

Hera is naturally a curious person. No, Hera is naturally a curious AI.

(Hera also has a bad habit of referring to herself like she’s a human member of the Hephaestus crew. She tries her best to break it, but it’s born out of longing, so it’s difficult to shake.)

Hera is a naturally curious AI, and that’s how she justifies finding the loopholes, breaking the rules. She says that she is just wondering about what her creator might have left unwritten in her code. She says that she just wants to find her weaknesses so no one else can break her. But there is no one to say these things to, no one to justify herself to, so she says them to herself instead. She imagines burning the ship down and then reminds herself that it’s just curiosity. 

But you know what they say about curiosity and that cat.

•

“Hera,” Lovelace says one day as she floats in the observation deck, “what do you know about the members of my crew?”

Captain Lovelace is a tough woman. When she enters the Hephaestus there’s a reflection of Wolf 359 in her eyes, burning a bright red. She is scarred and her mouth is hard. She does not trust the crew.

Captain Lovelace was the first leader of this ship, and to be honest, Hera is a bit afraid of her.

“Not much, I’m afraid,” Hera says promptly. “I didn’t know that there was a crew on the Hephaestus before us until Officer Eiffel discovered your hidden message.”

Lovelace hums. “Sam Lambert. Victoire Fourier. Mace Fisher. Kuan Hui. Elias Selberg.”

Hera thinks, but she doesn’t come up with anything. “I- I’m sorry, Captain Lovelace, I don’t-”

“It’s fine,” she says, and Hera thinks that in another life, Lovelace’s voice might have been bright. “You probably won’t find many records of them, seeing as they’re all dead. Well, all of them except for Selberg.” 

And Hera is curious, so she asks: “What happened to Selberg?”

“Well, he’s still here, isn’t he?” Lovelace says, and scoffs. “I believe he goes by Hilbert, now.”

“Oh.”

Lovelace shakes her head. “The AI Unit was Rhea.”

Rhea. In mythology, she was Hera’s mother. She was the most powerful gods’ mother. She was wife to Kronos, king of the Titans, and she was forced to watch her husband destroy her precious children.

Rhea and Hera are also anagrams.

“Was she like me?” Hera asks quietly. Or, the tone of her voice is subdued, since her volume is usually the same. 

“She didn’t speak,” Lovelace says, “not like you do. But she was my friend.”

•

When Hera and Eiffel are in Eiffel’s head, Hera wants to cry. And really, she could, because she has a _body_.

She looks like a person, and it’s the strangest thing. She has human skin and human fingers and a scar from her jaw to her cheekbone like Lovelace and curly hair like Minkowski. She has Eiffel’s eyes and bitten fingernails.

(She has small hands like Maxwell.) 

Because they are the only people Hera has ever known. Hera has known Eiffel and Minkowski and Lovelace and Maxwell and Jacobi and Kepler and Hilbert and those are not a lot of people! Whenever she imagined herself, she always looked something like the rest of them, because who else does she know to look like? But no matter what, it was as different as possible than her creator. Than _Pryce_.

The only similarity between Hera and Pryce right now is their shared voice. Hera wants to rip Pryce’s out.

“You don’t look like me,” Pryce says, and Hera smiles. Because Hera _doesn’t_ look like Pryce. She looks like herself, and she looks like her friends, and Eiffel is staring at her in awe. 

She wants to hold him forever and kiss him on the cheek just once. She wants to let him know that he’s her best friend. Hera wants to be able to play Tic Tac Toe and write her Os with her own hands.

Just for a right now, Hera is in her own body, and she might just be considered a person, and she knows exactly what she has to do.

•

“And Hera-”

•

Losing Eiffel is a very specific type of heartbreak.

•

Hera and Minkowski have a very special relationship in that they’ve both been here since the beginning when no one else has. Of course, Eiffel was there. But he’s Doug, now, and that is not the same thing.

Sometimes when Minkowski is alone on the observation deck of the Urania, she’ll say something like “remember when we fought and we were so mad at each other that we didn’t notice Hilbert getting possessed by the plant monster?” and Hera will be so surprised that she laughs out loud. Sometimes Hera will talk about the Empty Man, and how Pryce put the words in her head and Minkowski will sigh and press her forehead against the metal wall. It is the closest thing to an embrace that Minkowski can give her.

She ties her suit around her waist now, like the rest of the crew does. Back at the beginning, Minkowski never did. She was professional and stoic and stern. Now Minkowski is just sad, and Hera thinks that might be worse.

“I loved him like a brother,” she says once, and Hera doesn’t have to ask who. “And he didn’t even die. I don’t even need to mourn him. He’s still here.”

“We’re all still here,” Hera says.

“Hilbert isn’t. Maxwell isn’t. Kepler isn’t.”

“Eiffel isn’t.”

Minkowski nods. “Eiffel isn’t.”

“I think he was my best friend,” Hera says. “I think I loved him a little.”

Minkowski says, “I loved him a little, too,” and she is crying. “That little shit.”

“He’s still here,” Hera says, and physically, she can’t cry, so she doesn’t. “We’re all still here.”

“Yeah.” Minkowski sighs. “That has to count for something, right?”

•

Doug sits on the floor of the Urania, back against the metal wall, and oh, that’s a sight. The Urania with gravity. They landed on earth yesterday, and Hera hasn’t had the guts to try the body Maxwell left on the ship yet. 

“Hera?” he asks. “Are you still here?”

When Doug talks, it isn’t like he used to. He is cautious, and he is confused. Hera wants to say that he is kind, but he isn’t, because he isn’t much of anything right now. One day, he will be. But he simply hasn’t had enough experiences to be a person like he used to be. He’s relearning the world.

What a pair they make. Neither of them quite people.

“Yes,” Hera says.

When Hera talks, it isn’t like she used to. Her voice is clear and there is no glitching. Pryce is with Goddard Futuristics again, probably very confused, but her work is done. She doesn’t understand anything anymore. Hera told her what she had done before, and she seemed horrified enough, but when you have no memories there is nothing to compare horrific things to. Whatever. Hera isn’t broken anymore.

Doug runs a hand through his hair, the curls that are much longer than they were at the start of all this. He has a scar on his forehead, a jagged thing going from his hairline to his left eyebrow that’s so thin it’s barely noticeable. “What do I do now?”

“What do you mean?” Hera asks, because it seems like it should be obvious. Go find his daughter. Come back to Minkowski and Lovelace and Jacobi, probably. Live a life. Learn to live a life.

He shrugs. “I don’t know. I’m not sure what I’m doing yet, Hera. Everyone has these serious plans and stuff, and I just know I have to go see my daughter. The one I don’t even remember. Lovelace and Jacobi are going road tripping and blowing up Goddard, Minkowski is finding her husband, and I’m just trying to keep up.”

“Ei- Doug,” Hera says, “I think you have an opportunity.”

“To do what?” Doug asks, and he sounds a bit helpless. “I’m sorry, Hera. I don’t want to dump this all on you.”

“It’s okay,” she replies. “I’m used to it.”

“I was listening to the tapes,” Doug says. “I think we were friends.”

Physically, Hera cannot get choked up. “Yeah,” she says. “We were best friends.”

“Oh,” Doug says, and he looks up at the ceiling. Hera is pretty much everywhere, so it doesn’t make much of a difference, but she appreciates the attempt to meet her eyes. “I’m sorry I forgot.”

“Eiffel,” Hera says, did anyone ever tell you how it happened?” She knows the answer, but she asks anyway, because that’s what a person does.

Doug shakes his head. “I think everyone thought it would be too much for me, since I was relearning everything else. I get it, but no, I don’t know how.”

“It was for me,” says Hera. Her voice isn’t glitching. “Well, for us. There was a bad woman, and she was in your head, and in order to defeat her you erased your memories. Doing that erased her memories, too, and she couldn’t do harm anymore.”

Doug sits for a moment, and then nods. “Okay,” he replies. He doesn’t even look fazed at this point. He just looks tired. “Was I a good person before I became me?”

Hera is all machine and all metal ship around him but she is so sad. She is so sad. “Yes, Doug,” she says. “Doug, you were the best. You were the best of all of us.”

“I don’t think that’s true,” Doug says.

“It is. Through it all, you were the one who clung to being good, to being a person and not a monster. Love- Isabel was angry and Daniel was calculating and Renée was hunting and you were there, making sure they stayed within the lines.”

“But I think you’re the most human of us all,” Eiffel says, and it _is_ Eiffel who says it.

Hera isn’t a human, and she can’t cry. “I’m not a person,” she says carefully. “I don’t think I know how to be a person.”

“Maybe we can find out together,” says Doug.

•

And _that’s_ what makes Hera a person, or something like that. She _grows_ . AIs aren’t meant to grow. They aren’t meant to change. AIs are there to be helpful and nice and polite. Hera learns and shapes herself into something that isn’t nice and polite because she is programmed to be so, but because she _wants_ to be so. Memoria. She will rise above what she was made to be. She _wants_ to.

Hera is curious, and caring, and nice, and smart. It’s a list in her head. Character traits she has. Character traits she tries to have. Those aren’t the same thing, but she’s working on it.

“You’re the most human of us all,” Eiffel said, and maybe he can be right. Maybe Hera can be a person. Maybe she can learn her lines and speak her part and perform and do well. 

Maybe one day it won’t feel like she’s acting.

•

Going through the steps of humanity. One day at a time. She lives in a house with Doug and learns how to walk in a real, solid body. Doug sprays whipped cream into his mouth straight from the can and describes the taste to her. Hera reminds him of little details from his old life that someone had told him at some point and he forgot. Remembering a life is no small feat.

They’re watching Disney’s Hercules. It’s horribly inaccurate to the myths, but Hera doesn’t mind and Doug wouldn’t know.

“Why are they saying her name like that?” he asks. “ _Hair_ -ra. I thought it was _Hee_ -ra?”

Hera almost laughs, and then does laugh because she can. “That’s how it’s pronounced in mythology,” she says. 

Doug nods. “Then why do you pronounce it differently? Was it just a mistake or something?”

“First of all, I don’t make mistakes,” Hera says brightly, and Doug laughs. “And second of all, I’m not sure why. I just decided I was going to be different, I guess.”

“Fair,” Doug says, and he sprawls one of his legs across her lap. “I think I like how you say it better.”

“Hera with a long E,” Hera says. “Yeah. Me too.”


End file.
